Accepting digital payments is no longer enough. At Moonshot by TechCabal 2026, fintech executives from Mastercard, Remita and OPay sat down for a panel called "The Business Behind the Transaction" and made one thing clear: payment providers now need to help businesses manage cash flow, understand their customers and reduce fraud, not just process transactions.
Shabir Ahmed, Mastercard's Senior Vice President for Customer Solutions in Central Africa, pushed back against one-size-fits-all thinking. "Let's understand the customer, let's solve for the customer problem rather than providing a generic product push across the different businesses," he said. He pointed to connectivity, data-driven intelligence and trust as the qualities providers need to actually help businesses run better.
For Remita, going further means building out tools for financial management, invoicing and statutory compliance. Abimbola Onyluka, the company's divisional head for corporate and consumer business, explained that a payment record becomes far more powerful when it can support a loan application, a regulatory report or a business decision. Businesses need their financial data talking to banks, lenders and regulators, not sitting in a silo.
None of that expanded value matters if the core product keeps going down. Onyluka was direct about the need for dependable support and fast resolution when outages hit, because payment failures interrupt sales and hurt customer relationships in real time.
Isimeme Ayobami Owobo, OPay's director for key account merchants, added a practical note: the businesses growing fastest are the ones weaving technology into how they actually operate and training their people to use it well. The gap between businesses that thrive and those that stall may come down to exactly that.
Originally published by TechCabal.